Concrete walls typically are constructed by excavating a site, pouring footers, assembling concrete forms in the outline of the wall, pouring concrete into the forms, allowing the poured concrete to cure, disassembling or stripping the forms from the cured concrete wall, framing the wall, insulating the wall and applying drywall to the inner surface of the wall. The process can be time consuming and includes numerous steps. It would be desirable to develop an assembly and method for constructing a concrete wall that eliminates certain of the steps and simplifies the construction process without sacrificing quality and/or strength of the wall.
A method and material has been developed to eliminate forms and reduce the number of steps required to construct a concrete wall. The assembly and method includes a pre-fabricated foam material that is used in place of the concrete forms. In this assembly and method, concrete is poured directly into the foam material that is assembled in the fashion of forms. At the conclusion of pouring the concrete, the foam material is not stripped from the wall, as the foam material is used as permanent insulation. In addition, the foam material becomes integrated with the concrete as the concrete interdigitates or partially flows into and cures within a surface layer of the foam, to mechanically secure the foam to the concrete. Further, the foam material can include pre-engaged strips that are configured to accept fasteners for mounting drywall panels to the foam material to finish an internal surface of the wall. However, pouring heavy concrete into foam material can cause instability in the assembled foam material, which typically does not occur with concrete forms. The instability may result in defects in the wall that may cause failure of the wall in worst-case scenarios. It would be desirable to develop a method for constructing a concrete wall that reduces the steps of the process by utilizing the foam material, without sacrificing stability of the wall during the concrete pouring process.